Helped the client migrate to AWS and now can scale dynamically

Aug 08, 2023

Executive Summary

Our client, a global leader in food, beverage, health, biosciences, and sensorial experiences, they do a lot and continually innovate to do it better. They were facing challenges with their application deployment and management processes. To address these challenges, the organization decided to adopt Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to manage their containerized applications.

Customer Challenge

Despite the benefits of using AWS EKS, our client, a global leader in value- added ingredients, faced several challenges when building their production-grade AWS EKS infrastructure and tools. One of the most significant challenges was a lack of skills and talent within their organization. While the customer had some experience with AWS EKS, they lacked the expertise to design and deploy a production-grade AWS EKS infrastructure that could support their diverse portfolio of products.

To address this challenge, the customer decided to work with an AWS Partner to build their production-grade AWS EKS cluster.

Goal

The goal of this project is to successfully migrate the existing microservices from on-prem to AWS EKS by achieving the following objectives:

Partner Solution

The client selected Amazon EKS as their container management platform for several reasons. Firstly, they were already utilizing a variety of AWS services such as compute, storage, and data analytics to support their operations, making Amazon EKS a compatible solution for their existing infrastructure.

Additionally, as a managed service, Amazon EKS enables the client to run Kubernetes on AWS without the need to maintain their own Kubernetes control plane. Leveraging multiple AWS Availability Zones, EKS has the capability to automatically detect and replace unhealthy nodes, ensuring high availability for the containers. Furthermore, it provides on-demand and zero- downtime upgrades as well as the latest security patches, providing additional convenience and peace of mind for the client.

Intuitive.Cloud has been approached by the client to help them to design and set up production grade AWS EKS cluster(s). AWS EKS provides a highly scalable and secure platform to run and manage Kubernetes clusters, making it ideal for running containerized applications. As a standard practice, we started with a discovery phase, where we analyzed the application and infrastructure landscape in detail. Post discovery, we have proposed the AWS EKS based solution. We also worked on an automated deployment process for both AWS EKS and Kubernetes applications.

All the infrastructure that is part of our design is managed by Terraform. The customer application and K8s applications are managed and deployed using Terraform and ArgoCD.

Technology Stack

AWS EKS
AWS Certificate Manager
Amazon Simple Storage Service
AWS Secrets Manager
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
AWS IAM
Security Groups
Amazon Route 53
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
AWS Application Load balancer
AWS CloudTrail

Results and Benefits

With Amazon EKS there’s no need to install, operate, or maintain your own Kubernetes control plane Optimized workload performance while achieving significant cost savings for compute Increased product reliability and increased staff productivity.

EKS is a certified Kubernetes conformant, making it easy to run tooling and plugins developed by the Kubernetes open-source community. Moreover, any application running on Amazon EKS is compatible with those running on your existing Kubernetes environment, meaning you can migrate to EKS without making any code changes.

The DevOps automation framework has helped to manage deployments across pre-production and production environments seamlessly and securely. This solution has saved a significant amount of time and effort, reducing the time required for each build from 10 hours to 2 hours. The client has experienced a significant reduction in costs and effort as a result.